Political Cynic comments upon a Zionist Apologetics, in thrall to 1993 Oslo Accords!
The Financial Times has a ready supply of ‘writers’, to comment upon divisive issues, that must be handled by writers not connected with this newspaper? As a kind of self-defense, against its readership’s resort to a comments section, filled with caustic rejoinders. That leads the editors of this newspaper no alternative but to post a notice to its readers that the ‘Comments have not been enabled for this article’ Such is the case of this essay by Michael Goldfarb :
Israel-Hamas war
You can have justice or peace. But you can hardly ever have both
A popular protest slogan and the reality that for peace to prevail, sometimes justice is impossible
What might The Reader make of this declaration by Michael Goldfarb?
What is the process by which an historical event becomes sacred and incorporated into religious practice? Does that process even exist in the 21st century? Do events of “Biblical proportions” still happen?
The 75th anniversary of Auschwitz’s “liberation” by the Red Army approaches. I covered the 50th anniversary commemoration for NPR and I have been wrestling with these questions ever since.
I am a secular Jew. When I arrived at the dreadful place in January 1995, I hadn’t seen the inside of a synagogue for 15 years, yet by the time my two day visit was over I had been overwhelmed by a powerful emotion that I can only describe as religious.
https://michaelgoldfarb.medium.com/auschwitz-the-new-pilgrims-tale-631b848c739b
Mr. Goldfarb begins his essay with a critique of a pro-Palestinian marchers refrain:
“No justice, no peace!” shout pro-Palestinian marchers moving through cities in Europe and the US.
Mr. Goldfarb then recounts his experiences in Northern Ireland, torture in Greece and Chile. An he argues that ‘ The Holocaust could not have happened without the willing participation of many people’ and Some 99 per cent of the perpetrators never faced justice. Many SS members simply returned to their lives after the war. call these jejune at best! But more of the same ‘Yet many were re-employed in the legal system because peace, or at least stability, was needed so the country could provide a bulwark against Soviet expansionism.’
The Reader reaches the final five paragraphs of this lackluster exercise of Zionist Apologetics, via a maladroitly exercised History Made to Measure!
How did survivors and their wider communities feel about this absence of justice? At the commemoration to mark the 50th anniversary of the Red Army’s liberation of Auschwitz, I stood in the small crowd at the ruins of crematorium II and listened to Holocaust survivor and Nobel peace prize winner Elie Wiesel read a prayer he had written for the occasion:
Here are some critical comments on Elie Wiesel:
Martin Peretz, editor of The New Republic, considers Wiesel a public joke and a misapplication of the dignified Nobel Peace Prize.
Irving Howe declares in The New Republic that Wiesel is a publicity seeker; Alfred Kazin augments the charge with claims that the famed death camp survivor is both shallow and self-aggrandizing.
Jeffrey Burke of the New York Times Book Review carries denunciation to greater extremes by lambasting Wiesel for redundancy and purple prose. Such strong dissent impels Wiesel to unburden his conscience and to master the same objectivity in memoir that he demands of his newspaper reportage.
https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/n/night/critical-essays/wiesel-and-the-critics
“God of forgiveness, do not forgive the murderers of Jewish children here.” Then he described from memory frightened children being forced down the steps to the changing room and taken into gas chambers. “God, merciful God, do not have mercy on those who had no mercy on Jewish children.” This otherwise reserved and saintly man was calling down a heavenly justice on the perpetrators, because earthly justice had fallen short.
The present crisis in Gaza will ask similar questions of those charged with its resolution. When the conflict ends, and it must, who will define what justice means for crimes that were committed? After the second world war, the victors revived the International Court of Justice as a forum for cases brought by nations, not individuals, to adjudicate among other things “genocide”, a crime that had only just been identified as the scale of the Holocaust was revealed. But the term, and the laws concerning it, are in their infancy. Genocide is difficult to prove and nearly impossible to get recompense for. The recent case brought by the South African government against Israel at the ICJ for the way it is prosecuting its war against Hamas in Gaza demonstrates this.
The court found “plausibility” in South Africa’s accusation but it did not rule that Israel was in breach of the genocide convention. It did not order Israel to end its incursion into Gaza, but “provisionally” asked it to minimise civilian casualties. It asked Israeli politicians to refrain from making genocidal statements, something most Israelis and vast swaths of the Jewish diaspora wish for.
Simple ideals rarely survive their encounter with the legal and political processes necessary to make peace or justice a reality. After the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993, marking the beginning of a process that could have led to a two-state solution, Bill Clinton, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat spoke of a “peace of the brave”, not a peace of the just. For now, as the “justice” both sides are seeking is not tempered with mercy, there can be neither peace, nor justice, no matter how many miles are marched demanding both.
I have placed in bold font the most self-serving parts of these paragraphs, highlighting the Oslo Accords of 1993, as an expression of the toxic nostalgia engaged in by Michael Goldfarb!
Political Cynic
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